Friday, November 28, 2014

I'm thankful that Americans are fighting back hard against injustices such as the many killings by police lately. Even locally, protests have exceeded my expectations. But I don't think we can truly move forward until we stop living in denial about rigged elections.

Republicans in Maine have just been caught with their Pampers down around their ankles committing election fraud. In a Maine Senate race this month, Democrat Catherine Breen initially appeared to have won by 32 votes. But then, a pile of ballots from the town of Long Island mysteriously appeared in the ballot lockbox. Every single one of them had been cast for Republican Cathleen Manchester, who had demanded a recount.

Following the strange appearance of the additional ballots, there were now more votes cast in Long Island than the number of registered voters there. In fact, the voter sign-in book in Long Island indicates that 171 residents voted - but when you add in the "found" ballots, there's 192 ballots. Yeah, I know: "Their poo also voted." This is just like how Bush got more votes in a county in Texas than the number of residents the county had.

Because of the "found" ballots, Manchester was decreed the winner by 11 votes.

As unluck would have it, there's also a handful of disputed or "lost" ballots from other towns in the district.

Wednesday, November 26, 2014

Today I goed Roads Scholaring and went as far as North Fairmount, and later, I went to a very important meeting. People are fighting back against Team Tyranny, it seems, and this time it didn't take 10 months like it did after the 2010 disaster.

The Scholaring and the meeting were bookends to the day. Between these events, I stopped by the main branch of the Cincinnati public library for a while. Predictably, LAP bunker blasts were detected. Four of them, in fact.

Thursday, November 20, 2014

Gasps were heard a couple weeks ago when Tea Party Republican Steve Kraus unseated Ohio State Rep. Chris Redfern, chair of the state's Democratic Party. This upset occurred because Republicans had rigged the "election."

Now Kraus may lose his seat before even taking office. A grand jury has indicted Kraus on a host of felony charges stemming from the alleged theft of antiques and a shotgun from a house. A neighbor provided local police with photos of Kraus leaving the dwelling with some of the stolen items.

Oops.

I guess it's only fitting that Republicans steal antiques, because the GOP is supported by antique voters espousing antique ideas.

Monday, November 17, 2014

Capitalism means that when you acquire one serious health problem, every other illness known to modern medicine seems to set in as well.

Due to abuse at school and the resulting fear and shame, I've lived with PTSD for 24 years. I endured further humiliation at the hands of talk radio blowhards who kept bumping their gums about how I can simply bring myself up by my bootstraps, and if I fail, it's my fault. Great use of our public airwaves!

Almost inevitably, PTSD leads to other medical issues, and I don't owe anyone any further explanation of why my health worsened prematurely. Last week, I had a blood test, and on Friday, I got the results: hypocobalaminemia. The phone call was brief but somber.

Hypocobalaminemia - a type of severe vitamin B12 deficiency - is serious. I have severe and irreversible central nervous system damage from it. That much was clear even before the diagnosis. The burning in my feet, the constant feeling of being crushed, and the growing inability to perform basic tasks was a sign of certain damage.

All of that is a done deal. The damage is done, and the symptoms aren't going away. Ever. That's just how the doo-doo glides. I can't fix it. The only thing I can do is try to prevent it from getting any worse. That's going to be tough to do, since I can't find any food packaging that tells you how much vitamin B12 the product has.

Since Friday, I've been pondering about whether I'm even physically able to keep doing everything I've been doing. Fact is, I'm not able to. If you think it's so easy, why don't you contract a vitamin deficiency and then try it? One thing is for sure: The more things change, the more the Far Right stays the same, and their response to my condition will be the same catatonic harangue that it's been for decades.

My current situation has a cause that can be directly traced to what happened 30 years ago. The perpetrators still haven't been punished for their past crimes. Do you expect them to now, knowing the silly clowns who are allowed to clutter up local elected offices? The punishment phase is long overdue, and justice delayed is justice denied.

As if this wasn't enough, the doctor's office called again today and said I have a serious vitamin D deficiency too. This is caused by lack of sunlight. I hope the climate change deniers are happy that their inaction has yielded the dividends I'm sure they were hoping for.

Friday, November 14, 2014

The guffaws keep coming, but on the other hand, Massie accidentally exposed a very serious issue. Complaining about how House Republicans offered no choice but John Boehner for Speaker, Massie groaned, "There was only one person on the ballot. It's just like North Korea."

Well, Massie could've voted for a Democrat instead, but the more important point is that not only is it like North Korea, it's also like northern Kentucky. In most of the county "elections" in Kenton and Boone counties recently, the Republicans were unopposed. This included such important races as Kenton County Judge-Executive, where the only candidate wanted the county to pass its own unconstitutional "right-to-work" law. Most local state legislative races were the same way. Then there's Fort Wright, where a birther conspiracy theorist ran unopposed for mayor. If Massie wants to grumble about having only one choice on the ballot, he should start with some of the counties in his district.

How is this any different from the Soviet Union? The U.S.S.R. had sham elections with only one candidate - just like the Republicans in northern Kentucky do.

It's undemocratic in the extreme, and it's the main reason I won't move to Kenton or Boone county. I value my right to vote in free and fair elections. My rights have been violated too many times to not take it seriously.

There oughter be a law. There should be a law that says unopposed candidates have to run a write-in campaign. Either that, or they should have to put "Moscow" before their name.

Wednesday, November 12, 2014

Once you realize the Far Right is rigging elections, it takes a lifetime of groveling for the claim to be taken seriously - regardless of how much proof you have in plain sight. The Really Serious People would rather side with The Winners, don't ya know.

But Catherine Rampell of the Washington Post writes that Republican-penned voter suppression laws and red tape are now making all the difference in election outcomes...

The article cites new registration requirements, shorter poll hours, and other ills for padding the GOP's electoral power. The cost of obtaining a voter ID can run as high as $175 - making it an unconstitutional poll tax. (The last poll tax in the U.S. to be struck down in the '60s was only $1.50.) The margin of the Republicans' victory in many races last week was actually less than the number of people denied the right to vote under these policies.

This is the first time in a quarter-century I can recall any major media coverage of large-scale Republican election rigging. The last time I remember it mentioned was after the 1988 "election" when there was a tiny blurb in the newspaper about how poll workers in Santa Barbara, California, were ordered to throw away votes for Michael Dukakis.

Proof of rigged elections continues. How can you explain the fact that the GOP cleaned up in this cycle only in partisan elections? In nonpartisan elections and referendums, our side cleaned up. This shows the voting machines were preprogrammed to favor Republicans. This can't be done when there's no partisan label.

Perhaps the greater proof is this: Who the hell would vote for these idiots?! Remember, we're talking about the likes of David Perdue, Joni Ernst, and Scott DesJarlais here.

If you know how to write software for voting machines or vote scanners, then you know how to rig it for a specific party. Hell, I'd know how to do it if the software was in Atari BASIC. It doesn't take a genius. If you're rigging it for the Republicans, for instance, all you need to do is just program the machine to overcount votes for any candidate with a Republican label, or undercount votes for their opponents.

Why do you think the Republicans did so well in partisan elections this time, while our side cleaned up in nonpartisan races and referendums? Is there any other explanation for it?

Thursday, November 6, 2014

I think I've found the strangest candidate to win any "election" this past Tuesday.

Michael Peroutka was the presidential candidate of the misnamed Constitution Party in 2004. During the campaign, he appeared on a white supremacist radio show and called the program "a great blessing to our cause." He later became the biggest donor to Roy Moore's 2012 campaign for Alabama Supreme Court.

Now Peroutka is a Tea Party Republican, and recently he won a seat on the Republican Central Committee in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. And now he's actually won the general election for a seat on county council!

The man is weird. He says civil rights laws are invalid because "there is no such thing as a civil right." He claims gays recruit. He's a neo-Confederate secessionist. He claims to be for "limited government", but as an example of this stance, he said that "the function of civil government is to obey God and to enforce God's law."

Peroutka has also founded something called the Institute on the Constitution, which trains and nurtures Tea Party activists.

Another 1-percenter might be giving Peroutka some serious competition though. Gordon Klingenschmitt, another Tea Party Republican, was elected state representative in a heavily Republican district in Colorado. He once wrote a book claiming President Obama is possessed by demons. He also claimed gay soldiers take breaks from combat "to change diapers all because their treacherous sin causes them to lose control of their bowels."

The Republican brain rot virus must still be active in Peroutka's and Klingenschmitt's respective districts.

What a big day it's been for right-wing judges asking to be impeached for their judicial activism.

This story comes to us from Indiana. Not long ago, a court there properly blocked the state's right-to-scab law because the Indiana Constitution prohibits demanding services without compensation. But today, the far-right Indiana Supreme Court upheld the KKK-backed work-for-less law as constitutional.

Why? Because they're extremists who legislate from the bench, that's why.

One of the things we've been discussing over the past couple days is how to effectively fight back against the scoundrels of the Republican Right.

I'm not gonna be "the better man." I'm gonna do the Far Right the way they've done us. Fight fire with fire. Moderation doesn't work with them.

In other words, they will be exposed. I don't mean just their leaders. I mean their rank-and-file who spam websites with their garbage. Kind of like what we did with John Luebbers after his Facebook meltdown.

So, today we're exposing one Jim Wurst of Langley, Oklahoma. He stomps onto left-leaning Facebook groups and spams them with his vitriol.

That's because he's a Tea Party guy who has time to waste on stuff like that.

And here's another idiot who's been doing the same thing: Anthony Marrale of Kansas City, Missouri.

The Evil Empire talks shit about us, so we respond in kind. Fair is fair.

The Republican Right doesn't know when to shut up - despite still having no mandate to govern.

Now that voters in Shannon County, South Dakota, have voted 80% to change the county's name to Oglala Lakota County, the predominantly white supremacist South Dakota legislature thinks it has to approve the change before it becomes official.

Wrong. It's the people's county. It's not the legislature's county.

For one thing, the entire county is part of Pine Ridge Indian Reservation - a sovereign territory.

I go by what the county says. Not by what the legislature says. As far as I'm concerned, the name change is official. As a cartographer in my side job, I will consider the change official in all that I do.

The people's county, the people's rules. Not the legislature's county, not the legislature's rules.

More evidence that partisanship ruined only partisan elections this time. Almost everything else is ours.

Yesterday there were referendums in 12 cities in Wisconsin to amend the Constitution to abolish personhood for corporations. Voters in each of the 12 cities approved the measure with at least 70% support.

This ranks up there with that nonpartisan judicial race locally that the Tea Party lost by 20%.

Why did the Tea Party think it was a good idea to start attacking teachers? Team Tyranny gets mad at me for getting expelled from 4 schools (because that's "disrespecting authority"), but I'm not the one behind the war on teachers. They are.

A Tea Party-backed group got a referendum on the ballot in Missouri that would have banned tenure for teachers and fired them over students' standardized test scores.

Luckily, voters defeated the measure yesterday.

So voters all over America wanted to keep quality teachers, increase the minimum wage, end marijuana prohibition, and reject Tea Party judges as long as it was in a nonpartisan election. But they "elected" Republicans in partisan races, because apparently they think the modern GOP loves teachers, other workers, and civil liberties. Something seems fishy.

Before I go out tonight, I have a rather interesting note for county collectors far and wide resulting from yesterday's election.

Shannon County, South Dakota, consists of two-thirds of Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. This rural bailiwick is quite impoverished and is one of the most Democratic counties in America. It's also where the Wounded Knee massacre took place.

The county was named after Peter Shannon, a jurist who was involved in swindling the Lakota people out of their land. Yesterday there was a referendum to change the name of the county to Oglala Lakota County.

The measure passed with 80% - well exceeding the two-thirds it needed.

To the county's residents, this is a far more important matter than it is for out-of-state travelers who are just counting counties.

I'm going out this evening, and we're all going to have some serious discussion about what went down all across the nation yesterday.

No waiting until the following September this time. And no waiting 12 years like in 1994. (At least our waits are getting shorter.) We're gonna hash this out over a nice hot pizza and maybe some cold beer. Today.

We've put up with all we're gonna put up with, and that's what the meeting is about.

Let me be clear: This is unacceptable, and there will be accountability. As a progressive leader in this community, I will not stand for it. None of us should. It is disgraceful, and I will not tolerate it. Period.

Tuesday, November 4, 2014

Incidentally, here's a tidbit of good news - even though it's geographically too far away from us to enjoy it.

Remember last year when the NRA mounted a do-over campaign against several Colorado lawmakers and flipped those seats to the Republicans? Well, both seats in the Colorado Senate that were affected by this have now flipped back to the Democrats.

Well, peeps, this is the item I was watching most closely, and - by some miracle - it broke our way.

The Republicans have been gloating the entire cycle that this would be the year they'd accomplish their Holy Grail of winning a majority in the Kentucky House. That's what all that "FLIP THE HOUSE LOLOLOL" garbage was about.

As hilarity would have it, they came up vastly short. There's even at least one Republican incumbent who lost. (Unfortunately it wasn't 7-Cent Joe.)

This was more important than any other item, because we knew the U.S. Congress would be effectively locked regardless - and in Kentucky, the legislature has most of the real power anyway.

But don't flush too soon, because the modern GOP has no respect for democratic republicanism, and the only reason they took the Kentucky Senate some years back was through party switches. But almost all the party switches in the Kentucky House in recent years have been from Republican to Democratic.

In the meantime, we need to have a serious conference about media bias.

Hate to be the bringer of good news, since you were having such a great time pouting about the rest of the results today, but here it comes: Teresa Cunningham - Tea Party candidate for Kentucky Supreme Court - has been defeated by a margin of about 25 percentage points.

I guess people know how to think for themselves as long as there's not a party label cluttering up the ballot.

After voting machines in North Carolina were caught flipping votes to Republican candidates, the same problem has been discovered in Pennsylvania.

In Cumberland County, a voting machine was caught flipping a vote in the gubernatorial election from Democratic to Republican. Election officials breezily dismissed it as a "calibration issue", but that's an excuse the GOP has used a lot in recent years.

After you get home from the polling place today - where I'm sure you voted against the Far Right - settle down with the latest ish of The Last Word, that fanzine of freedom that's had your back since 1993.

The latest edition talks 'bout these amazing things...

• My trip to Texas and Oklahoma where people peed on stuff and we ate spoiled food.

Monday, November 3, 2014

Today I went to the Alison Lundergan Grimes rally at Newport on the Levee. It drew about 300 people! This contrasts with Mitch McConnell's rallies, which usually draw about 15 people - who have to be paid to show up.

I would post a photo of this event except that Blogspot - in another cavalcade of Google stupid - no longer displays the rest of your recent blog entries if you include a picture.

Sunday, November 2, 2014

Oh look, another story of Republican cheating that Chuck Todd and the rest of The Media are gonna ignore!

This time it's in North Carolina. Early voters in Greensboro are reporting that their votes for Democratic Sen. Kay Hagan are being flipped to fascist Republican challenger Thom Tillis. The machines have done it repeatedly. There have been at least 14 reports like this in Guilford County alone.

The election is coming up on Tuesday, and 2 facts have emerged that broadly define this midterm.

First, I've never seen such strong opposition to Republicans on the ground - certainly not in my adult life, and probably not in my entire life. This is a factual statement. This isn't mere speculation. This is real.

But more importantly, I've never seen such strong support for Republicans in The Media as I do now. Ever. And I've never seen so many outright lies spread by the press to back it up. Their lies can be disproven in an instant, but they double down. A Daily Kos commenter says there hasn't been as much "across-the-board, blatant, open, deep media bias like this year at any point since the 2000 election." Nope. It's worse than 2000.

Who do you think wins this battle? The people or The Media? I had strong hopes for this cycle before the press swiftboated Montana Sen. John Walsh. But no more.

Make no mistake: The GOP in 2014 is downright dangerous - especially in state legislatures.

What will you do starting Wednesday after the results are in? Here are your options...

1) Cry.

2) Move to Vermont or Detroit.

3) Wait 10 months, start a movement that's effective for 2 years before letting Tea Party members in so you can "understand" them, and watch them destroy it.

4) Fight back like an adult.

I know which options I'm doing. It may involve some combination of the above.

Saturday, November 1, 2014

Some things are facts, and some things are opinions. For instance, whether the toilet seat should be left up or down when nobody is using it is an opinion - not a fact.

But whether the Mitch McConnell campaign has committed several felonies with its new mailer is not an opinion. It is a fact. Team Glitch has sent out an intimidating letter to voters with the words "Election Violation Notice" on the envelope. The letter warns folks that they "are at risk of acting on fraudulent information" if they vote for Alison Lundergan Grimes. The Grimes campaign has been fielding calls from voters who are afraid of being arrested when they vote.

The Grimes camp has filed a lawsuit against the Kentucky GOP over the mailer and has requested a criminal investigation. The mailer violates a state law - KRS 516.030 - that makes it a felony to deceive folks into thinking a piece of mail is an official government document. It also violates KRS 119.155, which makes it a felony to engage in voter intimidation. And those are just the state laws. Federal laws against mail fraud and voter intimidation were violated too.

That the law was broken is unambiguous. Sure it hasn't gone to trial yet, but that doesn't mean no law was broken. If someone punched me in the face, I wouldn't need to wait for the trial to know they punched me in the face.

This scandal - just the latest to surround Mr. Elbow Care - is probably too late to bolster Grimes's election numbers, but it raises an important question: What if McConnell wins the election and gets indicted shortly thereafter?

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